Help me out, y'all. I'm thinking there has to be something going on behind the scenes and maybe some of y'all know what people do here.
I posted a story for the Summer Lovin' contest and before it got one-bombed, it sat at 4.81 with enough score votes to qualify, and from what I've seen in the past, that meant it stood a chance at placing in the top three. So I checked out the scores for all of the other stories in the contest to see where mine stood in the crowd, and found four that sat at higher scores.
When I checked out the scores for those stories on the story category pages so that I could see how many score votes each of the stories had, I was gobsmacked. One of the stories, that had just posted the day before, had already amassed over 400 score votes. One that had posted five days prior had amassed almost 900. By contrast, mine, which posted about ten days ago, only had 65.
I didn't initially find the pace of the score votes on my story unusual. The total seemed to tick up at about the same speed as it has on my other four stories. I know that what I write won't appeal to everyone because my ingenues are BBWs. But then when I saw stories getting hundreds of votes in one day, without commensurately high view counts, I knew something had to be up.
This 900-vote story is in the Romance category, and I've posted one in that category in the past. That Romance story of mine currently sits at a 4.78, which says "pretty well-received" to me. It has 18,503 views up to this point, 25 favorites, and 277 total score votes.
The recently posted Romance story to which I'm referring has, at this moment, 921 score votes, 18,832 views, 42 favorites, and sits at 4.80. So the view count and average score are almost identical to mine, the number of favorites is about 60% higher, and the total number of score votes is more than three times what my story has. This when that story has only been up for six days, while mine has been up for over a year.
I took the liberty of checking out this author's profile and found that he/she (henceforth "he") has only 10 stories posted, with the first one having gone up in late November of last year. So, by my math, that's less than 10 months on Literotica. I've been on for 15 months. He has "favorited" 18 authors and 19 stories.
I put all of these stats up to say that I would kind of understand over 900 score votes in six days if the author had been posting stories for 15 years (like some have), had hundreds of stories posted (like some do), had hundreds of favorite authors and stories (like some do), etc. That, at least, would attest to someone who had "put in the time", so to speak, and amassed a large and loyal following organically. I seem to gain an average of 7 or 8 followers per story I put up, so, multiplied by 200 stories, that'd be around 1,500 followers and if I were known to post prolifically, my name would be out there for people to recognize a lot better. I imagine that under those circumstances, I'd be getting a lot of score votes in the first few days as well.
I see no evidence of this from this relatively new author. Yet, over 900 score votes. If we're only looking at score votes per number of views, my Summer Lovin' story has 64 likely non-fraudulent votes in 12,823 views. (Furthermore, I put BBW in the title, so I imagine that it's highly unlikely that people who don't like BBWs would bother to read my story unless they're just looking to one-bomb it. Therefore it seems unlikely that it has any views in its count that come from people who opened it only to close it in disgust when they saw in my preface that the main female character is a BBW.) Multiplied out to 18,xxx views, I'd imagine it would have around 96 score votes. So this other story has almost ten times the number of score votes on a per-view basis.
I have said all of this to set the scene for my question.
Put simply, my question is, what are these authors doing to amass this many high score votes in relatively few views in such a short time?
My mind has conceived many possible answers to this question, and I'd like to see what y'all say, to determine which answer is correct (or if I haven't yet considered what's actually going on). I mean, it's easy to figure that they might be contacting all of their Facebook connections and saying, "hey, I just posted a story, how about you pop on over and give it 5 stars to help me out?" and some of those people would do that if they're the supportive type. I can imagine paying some cheap company in a country with a low labor cost like India to have a bunch of people rate a story at 5 stars. I can imagine forming an alliance with not-particularly-scrupulous Literotica authors to give each other's stories 5-star votes even if the people haven't read the stories in depth or don't think they'd otherwise deserve 5 stars.
(In my personal opinion, the story is well written, better than most on this site, but it has one glaring storyline error and a bunch of grammatical and spelling mistakes. While I might forgive the grammatical and spelling mistakes, I'm not the type to forgive an obvious storyline error. And then the most egregious sin of all is that it built up to its very first sex scene, on the 6th and final page, and then did not depict the sex scene. Rather, it skipped forward 25 years to where the guy and girl have been happily married for as long, and quickly ended. That's like smelling bacon cooking, then seeing it on a plate, and then being told that you don't get to eat any of it. For all of that, I couldn't give it more than 3 stars.)
I just want to know what y'all consider the most plausible explanation for this weirdness. Or is it that I'm the very first person to notice this and consider it weird?
I posted a story for the Summer Lovin' contest and before it got one-bombed, it sat at 4.81 with enough score votes to qualify, and from what I've seen in the past, that meant it stood a chance at placing in the top three. So I checked out the scores for all of the other stories in the contest to see where mine stood in the crowd, and found four that sat at higher scores.
When I checked out the scores for those stories on the story category pages so that I could see how many score votes each of the stories had, I was gobsmacked. One of the stories, that had just posted the day before, had already amassed over 400 score votes. One that had posted five days prior had amassed almost 900. By contrast, mine, which posted about ten days ago, only had 65.
I didn't initially find the pace of the score votes on my story unusual. The total seemed to tick up at about the same speed as it has on my other four stories. I know that what I write won't appeal to everyone because my ingenues are BBWs. But then when I saw stories getting hundreds of votes in one day, without commensurately high view counts, I knew something had to be up.
This 900-vote story is in the Romance category, and I've posted one in that category in the past. That Romance story of mine currently sits at a 4.78, which says "pretty well-received" to me. It has 18,503 views up to this point, 25 favorites, and 277 total score votes.
The recently posted Romance story to which I'm referring has, at this moment, 921 score votes, 18,832 views, 42 favorites, and sits at 4.80. So the view count and average score are almost identical to mine, the number of favorites is about 60% higher, and the total number of score votes is more than three times what my story has. This when that story has only been up for six days, while mine has been up for over a year.
I took the liberty of checking out this author's profile and found that he/she (henceforth "he") has only 10 stories posted, with the first one having gone up in late November of last year. So, by my math, that's less than 10 months on Literotica. I've been on for 15 months. He has "favorited" 18 authors and 19 stories.
I put all of these stats up to say that I would kind of understand over 900 score votes in six days if the author had been posting stories for 15 years (like some have), had hundreds of stories posted (like some do), had hundreds of favorite authors and stories (like some do), etc. That, at least, would attest to someone who had "put in the time", so to speak, and amassed a large and loyal following organically. I seem to gain an average of 7 or 8 followers per story I put up, so, multiplied by 200 stories, that'd be around 1,500 followers and if I were known to post prolifically, my name would be out there for people to recognize a lot better. I imagine that under those circumstances, I'd be getting a lot of score votes in the first few days as well.
I see no evidence of this from this relatively new author. Yet, over 900 score votes. If we're only looking at score votes per number of views, my Summer Lovin' story has 64 likely non-fraudulent votes in 12,823 views. (Furthermore, I put BBW in the title, so I imagine that it's highly unlikely that people who don't like BBWs would bother to read my story unless they're just looking to one-bomb it. Therefore it seems unlikely that it has any views in its count that come from people who opened it only to close it in disgust when they saw in my preface that the main female character is a BBW.) Multiplied out to 18,xxx views, I'd imagine it would have around 96 score votes. So this other story has almost ten times the number of score votes on a per-view basis.
I have said all of this to set the scene for my question.
Put simply, my question is, what are these authors doing to amass this many high score votes in relatively few views in such a short time?
My mind has conceived many possible answers to this question, and I'd like to see what y'all say, to determine which answer is correct (or if I haven't yet considered what's actually going on). I mean, it's easy to figure that they might be contacting all of their Facebook connections and saying, "hey, I just posted a story, how about you pop on over and give it 5 stars to help me out?" and some of those people would do that if they're the supportive type. I can imagine paying some cheap company in a country with a low labor cost like India to have a bunch of people rate a story at 5 stars. I can imagine forming an alliance with not-particularly-scrupulous Literotica authors to give each other's stories 5-star votes even if the people haven't read the stories in depth or don't think they'd otherwise deserve 5 stars.
(In my personal opinion, the story is well written, better than most on this site, but it has one glaring storyline error and a bunch of grammatical and spelling mistakes. While I might forgive the grammatical and spelling mistakes, I'm not the type to forgive an obvious storyline error. And then the most egregious sin of all is that it built up to its very first sex scene, on the 6th and final page, and then did not depict the sex scene. Rather, it skipped forward 25 years to where the guy and girl have been happily married for as long, and quickly ended. That's like smelling bacon cooking, then seeing it on a plate, and then being told that you don't get to eat any of it. For all of that, I couldn't give it more than 3 stars.)
I just want to know what y'all consider the most plausible explanation for this weirdness. Or is it that I'm the very first person to notice this and consider it weird?
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